Mercutio wrote:
y'know, I never really thought about that. it's like, it's one thing to tell a bunch of people "we made a game that not only has disabled people in it, but has them as the main characters, and shows that they're just like anybody else and that they deal with their issues without letting their disabilities keep them from living the lives they want." (or something like that, not too coherent after five hours of WoW.) you put it like that, people think you're all noble and stuff, they praise the game, all that jazz.
and then you say, "and they have sex, and the game shows it!"
...and you get an entire room of people saying "WTF?!" at once.
The strange thing about it is that I always believed KS treated the disabled so well
because it has no ability to ever be played straight as an oh-look-disabled-people-are-normal-too kind of thing. It's never this feel-good piece you'd expect to find on the computers in some public library with colorful, stereotypical characters with names like Manuel or Chrissy or anything else that sounds like it's from the 80s, with art taken straight from a Spanish 1 textbook. It never gets to play itself off as a PC, friendly, resume-ready development. From the start, it has to cope with the fact that at the end of the game, there will be sex with disabled girls, and everything will have to flow naturally into that.
Ultimately, the result is that instead of coming off as the standard preachy crap you'd get from a pamphlet at the doctor's office it goes a step further and
almost completely ignores the disabled issue. The inital process of coming to grips with the disabled population of the school is, of course, present, but both the protagonist and the player quickly move past that. We end up seeing them no longer as "that girl with no legs" or "the one with the fucked-up face" but as people, and it moves right on past the issue. Most other things that deal with the disabled tend to make them special by saying how ordinary they are repeatedly until it feels like the story is hiding something or being dishonest in some way, whereas KS moves beyond the danger of that entirely before you even realize it might be an issue. This, then, makes the parable above tragically accurate; it's the likely real-life outcome, but it
shouldn't be.
What I've always felt about 4LS is that they are a team of people, united by a common dream of making something they're all very dedicated to. They may stay together after this, if they find the right reception on release and manage to somehow transition that into a new project and/or financial success (not unthinkable); likely, though, this will stand as one of those remarkable testaments to what a team of people with a vision can do in their spare time. Is that so bad, though? With even only Act 1, they've managed to do more for the image of the disabled than most people would ever realize. While I'd certainly love to see more from them, they've also done a hell of a (sadly unrecognized, overlooked) public service.
